Barack Obama was just sworn in as President of the US and though he stumbled in repeating his oath, the speech that followed was delivered flawlessly and was widely praised around the web. (Several readers have told us that it wasn't Obama that stumbled, it was Justice Roberts.) There were quite a few concepts discussed that we suspect haven't been a part of past inaugural speeches. What words were used most often? We ran the full text of the speech through tag cloud generator Wordle.net for one view of the event, and just for the sake of historical context we ran George W. Bush's second inaugural speech through as well. Update: After one reader suggested it, we've also added word clouds from Bill Clinton's second inaugural speech and Reagan's first below. Second update: By reader request, we've added Lincoln's first and second inaugural speeches as well.

The most common words in the Obama and Bush speeches were dramatically different.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

TinEye a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Deputy Chief Lozier said that on the Internet search engine site Google there is a street view where people can look at photographs of neighborhoods in many locations.

Using the street view, he was able to look back and forth from the intersection.

Looking across a field, he said he saw a long building with a red roof that looked like a motel. He then did a search on Google for motels in Natural Bridge and found the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge, which, on a map, appeared to be close to the intersection he was looking at.

Not satisfied with that, he then looked at Google's satellite view of the motel and saw it was close to the intersection.

"I told Todd if I was going to throw the dice, I'd throw them there," he said.

Officer Neale then called state police in Virginia and told them the missing people were likely in the motel.

"History of the Internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.

You can see the credits for this movie onlonja.de/motion/mo_history_internet.html

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

You hear about 3D printing here and there, but for the most part it’s a bit irrelevant to the average person because fabrication is messy, difficult, and prohibitively expensive. Even dedicated DIYers have to get their stuff custom made. Hopefully that will all change with Shapeways, a new service which bills itself as a sort of Etsy for 3D models.